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Little Scotty, the over-sized, sweaty, sputtering face of the White House, is out! Sez Chimpy, “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott”. Yes, yes it will.
The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case of two Chinese Uighurs who have spent four years in Guantanamo for no very good reason, were “cleared” (determined to no more be enemy combatants, whatever that means) more than a year ago but not released because they can’t be sent back to China and no one else wants them. The Bush admin argued that their case shouldn’t be heard at all because their continued Gitmoization “does not establish that they are suffering irreparable harm requiring this court’s immediate intervention” and “The Executive’s power to detain enemy combatants necessarily includes the authority to wind up detention in an orderly fashion after a determination has been made that it is no longer necessary to hold a detainee for war-related reasons.”
Bush said today, “we also recognize that vacuums in the political process create opportunity for malfeasance and harm.” You knew he meant Iraq, right?
I’ve mentioned the, to me, obnoxious idea of Alabama “pardoning” Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists. I’m not revisiting that, but I need to give the prestigious Name of the Day award (sorry, Suri Cruise, you lose) to its sponsor, who I just found out is one Thad McClammy.
Rumsfeld explained today that retired generals were criticizing him because he had modernized the military and they’re stodgy old fogeys who don’t like change, such as cancelling the Crusader artillery piece, closing bases, adjusting our global posture and, oh yeah, totally and completely fucking up Iraq. No, “people like things the way they are, and so when you make a change like that, somebody’s not going to like it... It’s hard for people who are oriented one way to suddenly have to be oriented a different way.” I think he’s trying to tell us he’s gay. Sort of like Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos.
The worst use of “jazz hands” ever
Another of his great ideas that people have obstructed: performance pay. “The idea of paying for performance is stunning for some people.” It’ll be really stunning for him when he finds out he owes the federal government several billion dollars because of his performance.
He was asked a rather good question: why did he offer to resign twice during the Abu Ghraib scandal, when there wasn’t evidence that he was involved or knew about it, but not now, when there are questions about decisions he actually did make. Rummy: “Oh, just call it idiosyncratic.” That’s one word for it.
Here he deploys the “Rummy Scowl of Doom” on a hapless reporter
Gen. Peter Pace made an interesting comment about militias coming under central government “control.” Asked to elaborate, he said that when (and if) there is a central government, it will have to decide “either... to assimilate them back into civilian society without weapons or into the police forces or the army with weapons”. Huh.
Bush went to a magnet school in Maryland today, and learned all about magnets. Science, he said, is “cool.” Except for climatology and evolution and genetics and...
You know, just once I’d like him, when he goes to a school, to go to a crappy one, or even an average one, and sit in on a real average class. He just has no idea. He sees the dog and pony show, he sees “people using little devices to look for sun spots,” and he thinks that’s what it’s like every day. Here he is defending No Child Left Behind:
And, oh, by the way, I’ve heard every excuse not to measure -- you know, You’re teaching the test. No, you’re teaching a child to read so he or she can pass the test, that’s what you’re doing. Or, All you do is test. No, good schools are those who [sic] have got a curriculum that enables a child to be able to pass a standardized test. That’s what we’re talking about.
Piffle.
Today the Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Technology, tomorrow, ze world!
Here he greets students of the magnet school while standing on the chest of the photographer taking this picture.
Here a student explains his science project for the fourth time, using even smaller words, but Bush still just doesn’t get it.
And finally a couple of random pictures from the visit of Bush looking like a doofus.
Secretary of War Rumsfeld told Rush Limbaugh today that if we’d listened “every time there were critics and opponents to war... our country would be a totally different place,” adding, “for example, if we hadn’t started the Spanish-American War, we wouldn’t have that nice base in Guantanamo to torture prisoners in.”
The White House issued a statement about the bombing in Tel Aviv, in which 9 people died. They’re against it. Indeed, “no excuse or justification is possible.” And the Pentagon issued a statement about the killing of 7 Afghan civilians by American troops. In that case, evidently some excuse or justification was possible. But not apologies, and I stress this because some news reports said that the military apologized for killing innocent bystanders. In fact, it said that it “regretted” the deaths, but blamed them on “terrorists” for “expos[ing] innocent civilians” to the “grave risk” that Americans would shoot them.
A nice piece of reporting from the Times (London) Monday about those brave men walking a beat in Baghdad: postmen. They have to take different routes to avoid being kidnapped, figure out where people have disappeared to, and sort out mail sent to addresses that no longer exist.
You’ll remember I linked to this Sunday Times story about plans for a “second liberation of Baghdad,” described this way by a Pentagon adviser: “If you cut up the city into pieces neighbourhood by neighbourhood, you can prevent it from becoming a major urban fight.” And we see in the NYT that troops have already “sealed off” a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. If these tactics sound at all familiar, well, today’s Ha’aretz says that one response to the suicide bombing (besides the shelling of Gaza, which has killed at least 25 this month) will be “Stricter implementation of the policy of separating the West Bank into sections, in an effort to prevent Palestinians from moving from one section to another”. Great minds think alike, or something.
China is bestowing upon a no-doubt grateful Tibet a 35-ton, 24-foot statue of Mao, which they decided was a cheaper way of “marking” their territory than the original plan, which involved tanker trains full of urine.
The sculptor claims that he tried to make Mao look a bit like Buddha. Searching for stories on this, I couldn’t help but notice that Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, also features prominently a story, “Cruise: Holmes is a Scientologist.” Evidently that’s big news in China. Big “Dawson’s Creek” and “Risky Business” fans, I’m guessing.
Speaking of granite (the Mao statue, not Tom Cruise’s acting) (or the contents of Katie Holmes’s head for getting involved with Tom Cruise), Bush today visited a Europa Stone Distributors. Here, he is seen mesmerized by his own reflection in a polished granite table.
Little-known fact: Dick Cheney casts no reflection.
Here, he is seen hangin’ with some of the workers there, in a picture which is in no way awkward.
And for this picture, you may provide your own caption:
The pope weighs in on the Iranian nuclear issue: “May an honourable solution be found for all parties, through honest and serious negotiations.” Now why did no one else think of that? That must be why he’s the pope.
Iyad “Comical” Allawi and Adnan Pachachi suggest a coup to “save [Iraq] from its current deadly crisis,” with a government of strong men modesty forbids them from naming, ignoring the results of the December elections.
The Chicago Tribune (via Juan Cole, reg./BugMeNot, void where prohibited) asked how the US was following the Leahy Amendment, which requires no military aid to foreign security units connected to human rights violations, in Iraq. You will be surprised and amazed and shocked to hear that it isn’t. In fact, the US isn’t really tracking where the tens of thousands of guns it has given the Shiite-militia-riddled Interior Ministry are going. And the US embassy has no system in place for tracking allegations of human rights abuses. And despite the discoveries of secret Interior Ministry torture prisons, Americans still don’t inspect Iraqi detention centers.
In case the US invades, Iran has started recruiting martyrs. They sign a “Registration form for martyrdom-seeking operations.” Who knew there’d be paperwork?
The NYT says that inflammatory social issues may not do it for the Republicans in the 2006 elections. Lindsey Graham utters this rather wonderful sentence: “Gay marriage is not the magic bullet to get us out of our situation.” The article has this picture, featuring the international symbol for unisex bathrooms heterosexual marriage.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s former prime minister and current #2 man in Kadima, says that Iranian President “Ahmadinejad’s statements remind those of Saddam and he will end up the same way as Hussein has.” In other words, he is threatening Iran with American invasion. That should go over well in the Muslim world. Also, “Ahmadinejad represents Satan and not God.”
Ha’aretz says that Israel’s master plan is to wait until Palestine is reduced to complete chaos, and then offer to release Marwan Barghouti, who would ride in and save the day from Hamas, but only if the US released Jonathan Pollard. The paper doesn’t name its sources, so who knows how serious this really is. One thing about Pollard: Israel has been demanding the release of their spy for 20 years, but has never been willing to reveal just what information he gave them.
By the way, Israel has been shelling Gaza very heavily in recent days, and has reduced the distance they’re supposed to keep between their targets and civilian housing to exactly the same as the distance that fragments fly from the point of impact. All to the news media’s usual deafening silence, blind indifference, and, oh, some metaphor involving the sense of smell.
Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times of London says that the US is planning a “second liberation” of Baghdad when/if an Iraqi government forms (four months today since the elections!), in essence a re-invasion involving rockets, attack helicopters, etc etc.
The article says that Baghdadis now carry two ID cards, one for Shiite militia checkpoints, one for Sunni militia checkpoints.
A DEA agent who literally shot himself in the foot while demonstrating gun safety to children is suing the agency because the tape of the incident somehow leaked out into the public domain, causing him emotional distress, preventing him from doing undercover work, and also for some reason they won’t let him make those presentations anymore.
I was hoping for a transcript of Scalia’s comments at the U of Conn. Law School, but no such luck. I’d forgotten that all his appearances are subject to the rule of omertà. We do know that Fat Tony said that his refusal to recuse himself from the case involving Cheney’s secret energy task force was the “proudest thing” he has done whilst on the Supreme Court. Yes, for centuries to come, Scalia’s words of wisdom will resound throughout legal history: “quack quack.” He suggests that “if you can’t trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life.” Coming from a man supposedly skilled in logical argumentation, the second half of that sentence doesn’t have much to do with the first half. You start off expecting him to put some sort of case for the integrity of the judiciary – rather an important cornerstone of the third branch of government, since there is no recourse against an unethical justice – and instead get a blank dismissal, indeed an insult directed against anyone who vests less than blind, unquestioning faith in the Infallible One.
Speaking of infallible, Bush has issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld, in which he repeatedly called him Don. Evidently, Don’s “energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period,” adding “if you can’t trust your securrtery of dee-fense more than that, get a life.”
Rummy Don spoke energetically and steadily in an interview with Al-Arabiya yesterday (scheduled for C-SPAN today 6:45pm PST).
Asked how the situation in Iraq differed from a civil war, Rummy Don said that “If you go to civil wars historically and look at them in different countries around the globe, they have existed in time.” Um, right. They’ve also existed in height, width and depth. What’s your point? “I’m not going to get into the debate as to semantics as to what is or is not a civil war. ... I personally think of it as a situation where in 18 provinces of the country about 14 are at peace.”
Asked about Guantanamo, Rummy Don trashed the UN report because the UN team hadn’t been to Gitmo. The reporter pointed out that this was because they wouldn’t have been allowed to speak to any prisoners. He said this was because the Red Cross goes there and “To let any other group go down there, and then you have to open the floodgates and let everyone go down there.” Everyone? The United Nations is not “everyone.” The Red Cross, says Rummy Don, “do, in my view, a job that is representative for the world of what the actual situation is.” Except in as much as they’re not permitted to speak publicly about conditions there.
Rummy Don repeats his recently acquired mantra that it’s all Turkey’s fault. If it had allowed US troops to enter Iraq through Turkey, the Sunnis could have been crushed early on. Or greeted us as liberators. Or something.
And said that if secretaries of defense quit every time a bunch of retired generals criticized them, it would be like a merry-go-round. Whereas now, it’s like another ride.
At yesterday’s Gaggle, McClellan sounded really upset at the WaPo, saying, “That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don’t know how The Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible.” He added, “Really, I don’t know how and I wish they’d give me some pointers on how, cuz no one ever believes me when I defend irresponsible shit.”
I’ve never been quite sure what the phrase “international community” is supposed to mean. Isn’t that, like, everyone? Still less do I understand how this community can have a greater or lesser degree of credibility, but Condi Rice says (while standing next to her “good friend,” Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, as every blogger and his uncle have pointed out) that the UN must slap down Iran hard (take “strong steps”) in order “to make certain that we maintain the credibility of the international community on this issue.” Credibility with whom? The Martian community?
Bush met today with the president of Ghana, who uttered the least credible sentence of the day: “I want to thank the President for understanding Africa.” Understands Africa? I’m surprised he’s heard of it.
The White House issued one of those amusing “Setting the Record Straight” releases, attempting to bury the WaPo story about the mobile “biological weapons labs” under a flurry of disinformation and distortion. It dismisses the DIA field report as a mere “preliminary finding,” ignoring the fact that it was, you know, accurate, says that it’s not the practice to change (false) reports by the intelligence community just because they’re contradicted by people on the ground, and ignoring the question of whether the White House was aware of the report when Bush made his statements (Scotty McClellan said today that he was “looking into that matter”.) You can read the thing and count the distortions for yourselves, including accusing the Post of saying that Bush’s only rationale for invading Iraq was WMDs, although the quote from the WaPo says no such thing. My favorite bit (and the second least credible sentence of the day): “The Administration Has Repeatedly Acknowledged Intelligence Problems And Has Taken Multiple Steps To Address Them.”
Name of the day: the new Italian parliament will include four out gays. One of them, who was re-elected, is named Titti De Simone.
Which is also her porn name.
Iraqi Interior Minister Jabr tells the BBC that death squads are “not police.” But when asked if the reverse were true, if the police are death squads, he remembered another appointment and backed quickly out of the room.
The Czech manufacturer of semtex explosives has decided not to sue Madonna for damaging their good (trademarked) name by calling her company Semtex Girls Ltd.
Bush held another staged event to try to convince people to join his Medicare drug plan. Kept talking about how many choices people had now, although he admits “Some people just simply don’t want to be confronted with choice.” But he loves him some choice. For example, the audience members were all chosen by the local Republican party and chamber of commerce.
As someone who uses a fair number of quotes in my blog, I’ve noticed the tendency of news organizations to “clean up” quotations – eliminate awkward constructions, combine sentences, insert clarifying words that were never actually spoken, etc – often while retaining the use of quotation marks. This is why I so often seek out a transcript when I see a “quote” I want to use in a news article. Eli at Left I on the News has caught AP turning these words from Rumsfeld today about Iran – “It’s a country that has indicated an interest in having weapons of mass destruction” – into “‘It is a country that has indicated’ a desire to obtain nuclear technology.” First, they totally uncontracted that contraction, second, in deciding to turn his bombastic lie into an accurate statement, they missed that he did not technically lie, but used language intended to mislead. Rumsfeld’s very deliberate choice of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t just intended to be emotive. He intended it to be understood as asserting that the Iranian government had actually said it wanted nukes, which it does but isn’t so stupid as to say in public, but if heaven forfend he were actually challenged, he could say that by golly gosh golly he meant that Iran has used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War and therefore can’t be trusted with nukes. The care that went into this mislead (Rummy not normally being the most careful of speakers) shows the importance the Bushies put on demonizing Iran, almost... as if... they’re planning... something...
During that briefing, Rummy was flanked by General Peter Pace, who is supposed to be the sane one but who kept referring to himself by name: “Pete Pace believes...”, “As far as Pete Pace is concerned...” (Notice that he’s good enough friends with himself to call himself Pete just as Robert Dole always called himself Bob.)
La commedia è finita, but how was it that Prodi only just barely managed to defeat the buffoon? Jonathan Freedland suggests in the Guardian that the recent trend of razor-thin victories in Germany, the US etc show that electorates strongly dislike the free-market, globalization-loving attacks on social welfare programs but that the oppositions have failed to provide a meaningful alternative.
Berlusconi controls most of the Italian media and is a monumentally sore loser, so good luck to Prodi, he’ll need it.
So on “West Wing,” Matt Santos was elected fake president. The first Hispanic fake president. If you ignore the fact that Prez Bartlett is played by an actor named Ramon Estevez.
Prodi seems to have defeated Berlusconi, but by a close enough margin that the latter will demand a “scrupulous” examination of the ballots. Which would be the first scrupulous action Berlusconi has ever taken. Who would have guessed he even knew the word?
The state of North Rhine Westphalia has been retraining prostitutes as nursing home workers. Says the person in charge, “They have good people skills, aren’t easily disgusted and have zero fear of physical contact.” Says one person in the program, “Prostitution taught me to listen and to convey a feeling of safety. Isn’t that exactly what is missing so much in care of elderly people?”
You’ve probably all read the WaPo piece about the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to build up Zarqawi as Villain of the Week, because while Bush may talk about foreign policy being based on principles, he can’t function without demonizing someone. My favorite bit is the quote from a briefing: “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response.” Leverage xenophobia response. Just charming. So the idea was to get Iraqis to equate the insurgency with a foreigner and forget that there was also this rather large occupying army in Iraq which was also made up of, you know, foreigners.
The Pentagon has responded to the article by saying that Zarqawi really is a great big scary villain. Gen. Rick Lynch, who I am officially awarding Mark Kimmitt’s old title of Military Moron for his many stupid comments and for not knowing the meaning of the word insidious, insists that Z. & those he recruits, trains and equips are responsible for 90% of the “insidious suicide attacks” in Iraq.
Bush pooh-poohs the notion that he plans to attack Iran militarily, calling it “wild speculation”: “I know we’re here in Washington [where] prevention means force. It doesn’t mean force necessarily. In this case it means diplomacy.” In Washington prevention means force? Is that a regional dialect thing like hoagies & grinders, o lexicographer in chief?
One of the students at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins (a first-year) asked Bush what, if any, legal authority governs the actions of private contractors in Iraq. He didn’t know. Boy, didn’t he know. You must, must, must watch the video. Bush has become a parody of Jon Stewart’s parody of him.
Much of the speech portion was spent scolding Iraqi politicians for failing to form a government “that unifies all Iraqis.” Really, his language is getting dangerously insulting, ordering them to “put aside their personal agendas,” thus reducing the political problems of Iraq to issues of ego.
He also belittled American foreign policy before the arrival of his enlightened rule: “And our foreign policy prior to my arrival was ‘if it seems okay, leave it alone.’ In other words, if it’s nice and placid out there on the surface, it’s okay, just let it sit.” He makes it sound like an unflushed toilet.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that Iraq has a “high level of slaughter” rather than a civil war. So that’s all right, then.
He also says that the idea of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran is “completely nuts.” And your point is? He says there is “no smoking gun” on the Iranian nuclear program. A quick historical quiz for Mr. Straw: recollect a famous sentence that contained the words “smoking gun” and the words “mushroom cloud.”
The Indian state of Rajasthan has banned religious conversions, the 6th Indian state to do so. Indian usage of the word seems to be narrower than American, and less confusing, so what is being banned is not changing one’s religion (á la Afghanistan) but converting someone else. The state’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, claims Christian missionaries bribe poor people to convert. For the purposes of the law, one’s original religion is deemed to be that of their ancestors; that is, religion is inherited. Thus, if Hindus re-convert converts, and they certainly try, that would not be illegal.
Speaking of bigots, the racist British National Party has been riven with controversy over just what constitutes a wog after it adopted a man whose grandfather was a Greek-Armenian immigrant as a candidate for local elections in Bradford, most party members not considering him really One of Us.
So a naturalized American citizen of Palestinian origin, Arafat Nijmeh, a mental patient, told his alleged mental-care workers at the Alton Mental Health Center that he wanted to castrate George Bush. They promptly called the Secret Service, and Nijmeh has been indicted for “knowingly and willfully” threatening His Highness. Overreact much?
Today was Iraqi Freedom Day, the anniversary of the stunt in which Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by Marines from the crack 75th Unsubtle Propaganda Division. How did y’all celebrate? Iraq celebrated with the usual bombings, shootings and whatnot. Freedom, ain’t it grand?
Huzzah and kudos to the headline-writer at the WaPo. Today, we have the lovely “Campaign Draws to Abusive Close in Italy” and we have “At Least Six Killed in Israeli Strike On Alleged Training Camp in Gaza,” which does that rarest of journalistic things: not taking an Israeli statement on faith.
Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker about Pentagon covert ops in Iran, including contact with “anti-government ethnic-minority groups” – because that’s worked so well in the past – and picking out targets for our planes to bomb (the Pentagon claims that such operations are “force protection” military rather than intelligence operations, and therefore don’t have to be reported to Congress). His ex-DOD source tells him that the Pentagon’s planning is predicated on the belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government” – because that’s worked so well in the past. The article also examines Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s increasing interest in using tactical nuclear weapons.
Screenshot from the Pentagon website, “President Defends Iraq War for Peace.”
